Chaidyn Young-Haynes
palmettoreport@gmail.com

(Rock Hill, S.C.) — More than 50 years have passed since Winthrop University, which at the time was called Winthrop College, became a fully coeducational school.

Prior to the fall of 1974, Winthrop allowed limited admission to men, mostly as graduate students and occasionally as upper classmen.

It took a new law, which was passed by the S.C. General Assembly in March 1974, to allow the school to admit men on a full-time basis.

Mary Beth Hughes, who attended Winthrop from 1970-74, was in the final all-girls class at Winthrop.

She was a guest on the Palmetto Report podcast to recall her experience and the changes she witnessed, after the school went fully coeducational.

“It was a big deal, because all of the sudden there were a lot more men on campus,” Hughes said.

“I thought it was kind of ironic they thought they should have the right to an education and that’s one reason Winthrop was an all-girls school, because a lot of places wouldn’t let women go to school,” she said. “So (women) had to get their own schools. Education has changed a lot.”

Hughes, who was born in Columbia, S.C., said she was the first in her family to graduate from college. She said it was her lifelong dream to attend college.

“Looking back…a lot of my teachers were Winthrop graduates, because Winthrop was known as a teacher’s school. If you wanted to be a teacher, then Winthrop is where you wanted to go,” she said.

“I kind of fell into (teaching) at first, because I didn’t want to be a secretary like my mother. I didn’t want to be a nurse, because the blood would make me (sick). I didn’t want to do that. So the only other thing that seemed within reach at the time was teaching. All these new professions now weren’t necessarily open to women then,” said Hughes.

She said women often felt special on campus, before the arrival of men.

“The nice thing about being at a women’s college was everything here was for the women,” Hughes said. “I was a (physical education) major and we didn’t have to wait our turn to use the gym or anything like that. Women were number one and that was a good feeling.”

Hughes also said life in the dorms was especially different at an all-girls school.

“It was so funny, on the weekends, if somebody had their boyfriend come up or something; each dorm had a house mother and she would come down and say ‘man on the hall.’ Some people would run around in their pajamas or something, but that was a big deal for a guy to come on campus on Saturdays or Sundays,” she said.

Winthrop recognized the 50th anniversary of the move to coeducation in 2024 with an exhibit in the Louise Pettus Archives and Special Collections.

* Joseph Kasko contributed to this report.